The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

$27.95$27.95

Required

QTY

The Color of Law: A
Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated AmericabyRichard Rothstein

27.95

"Rothstein
has presented what I consider to be the most forceful argument ever published
on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced
neighborhood segregation." ―William Julius Wilson

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American
metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes
the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided throughde
factosegregation―that is, through individual prejudices, income
differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate
agencies. Rather,The Color of Lawincontrovertibly makes clear that it
wasde juresegregation―the laws and policy decisions passed by
local, state, and federal governments―that actually promoted the discriminatory
patterns that continue to this day.

Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research
that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to
chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing
how this process ofde juresegregation
began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a
great historical migration from the south to the north.

As Jane Jacobs established in her classicThe
Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed
urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods
we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how
government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing
and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas
rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War
II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that
no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and
prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to
black families in white neighborhoods.

The Fair Housing Act
of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential
patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in
cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the
legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. “The
American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book”
(Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein’s
invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we
finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.